Delirio

What happens when one’s lover simply vanishes overnight, when no trace is left and it’s as though the person never existed? We probably start probing for reasons and scrutinising ourselves, society and the very person who has disappeared. Georg Friedrich Händel’s solo cantata Il Delirio Amoroso (1707) tackles these very same issues. Tirso has died and Clori descends to Hades to rescue her loved one. Yet her love proves to be a chimera: he can’t even bring himself to look at her. Despite this, she leads Tirso out to the Elysian Fields. Making full use of his palette of orchestral colour, Händel sketches a psychological profile of an abandoned woman, a study that is much more than just a removable transfer of a lonely madwoman. Taking Händel’s music as a starting point, composer Zad Moultaka and director Wolfgang Nägele hunt for clues to the disappearance and try to render palpable the limbo between hope and resignation.

The music of the Lebanese composer Zad Moultaka cannot be neatly compartmentalised. A multi-disciplinary artist who is equally at home as a fine artist, Moultaka has drawn on eclectic influences and traditions to build his own idiosyncratic style. This is the first Berlin project of the young director Wolfgang Nägele, a recipient of the Tischlerei Award for his RING concept, following his work at institutions such as the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.